The New Year's Offering

An Art Institute of Chicago chuban print dated to about 1769, The New Year's Offering depicts a domestic scene of New Year ritual, when households across Edo presented kagami-mochi (mirror rice cakes), pine decorations, and ceremonial sake to mark the most important holiday of the year. Koryusai's treatment situates the offering within a quietly elegant interior, the offering table and ceremonial decorations carefully observed but never overwhelming the human figures of the scene. The chuban format and pastel registration place the print squarely in his early mature manner, and the seasonal subject reflects the calendrical organization that underlies so much of his print oeuvre: twelve-month series, eight-views series, twenty-four-paragons series, and zodiac series, all of which used the structure of the Japanese year as a scaffolding for fashionable bijin and genre subjects.